Are We Not Drawn Onward, We Few, Drawn Onward to New Era

Valerio Carrubba is an Italian artist, born Sicily in 1975, and now living and working in Milan. His work is defined by vibrant colors and hyper-realistic imagery that has a way of jumping off the canvas at you. To create this effect, he uses high quality oil paints and ultra thin synthetic brushes on stainless steel canvases that are prepared by spraying two layers of a transparent primer for metals and two layers of white acrylic pigment before painting.

Degas Is Aged – 2008 Oil on stainless steel, 60 x 52.6 cm

Delia Failed – 2006 Oil on stainless steel, 60 x 52.6 cm

Nina Ricci Ran In – 2006 Oil on stainless steel, 60 x 52.6 cm

Bird Rib – 2007 Oil on stainless steel, 52 x 70 cm

From his gallery’s website:

What is unusual about Valerio Carrubba’s process is his choice to paint the same picture twice, so that the superimposition of the same figure creates a slight mismatch in lines and forms. This repeated action transforms the painting into an automatic gesture, that at one and the same time, emphasizes and repudiates the subject.

If you have a keen eye, you may have noticed that all of the titles are actually palindromes (as is the title of this post!), words or phrases that can be read forwards or backwards without a change in meaning. Carrubba’s painting technique could be described as palindromic as well – he implements a doubling of each brushstroke to take away any hint of texture, which I think gives his paintings a certain stoicism.

And while I have always been a big fan of anatomical drawings (likely the reason I was drawn to his work), Carrubba was not actually very interested in the anatomy itself. As noted in one interview with Carrubba:

My approach to painting is totally conceptual. My work is to continually develop the realisation of processes from which pictures are derived. Putting the idea of form, subject and content in crisis, they arrive at the loss of the image and its meaning… …I am not interested in anatomy itself, it is just a means. I try to emphasise this ambiguity.

Needless to say, Carrubba must have studied his anatomy quite closely to produce such accurate portrayals of the human body.